U.S. Policy: In 1997 the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which warned President Clinton not to enter into any global warming treaty that leaves out developing nations or hurts the American economy. This is still U.S. policy today and should serve as the overarching guidelines for the December global warming conference in Copenhagen.

An Expiring Kyoto: The Kyoto Protocol is the major global warming treaty currently in place, and it expires in 2012. The Copenhagen conference has long been seen by Kyoto proponents as critical for extending the provisions into the decades ahead.

Kyoto Not Ratified: After Vice President Al Gore agreed to the protocol, President Clinton failed to even submit it to the Senate, knowing there wasn't support for a treaty that so obviously violated the Byrd-Hagel Resolution.

Massive Kyoto Costs: The U.S. didn't ratify the Kyoto protocol for good reason. Its provisions would have been economically disastrous and environmentally inconsequential. Kyoto failed to reduce emissions, and the developing world--especially China which now out-emits the U.S.--was completely exempt. An Energy Information Administration study at the time projected costs of U.S. compliance to be between $100 billion and $397 billion annually.

Kyoto a Failure

Increasing Emissions: As expected, emissions from exempted developing nations skyrocketed since 1997, but surprisingly, so have emissions from most developed nation signatories. Many Western European nations, and even Japan and Canada, have experienced faster emission increases than those of the U.S. The fact that the U.S. is doing better as a Kyoto outsider than many Kyoto insiders is a lesson that ought not to be lost at Copenhagen.

An Overstated Problem: There has been little or no global warming since the Kyoto Protocol was signed, despite increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

Countdown to Copenhagen

Developing Nations: The need to include developing nations is even greater today. Developing-world emissions began to outpace developed nations in 2005, and they are projected to continue increasing seven times faster.

China's emissions growth is projected to be nine times higher than the U.S.'s through 2030.

Copenhagen Likely Worse Than Kyoto: As economically damaging as Kyoto would have been, Copenhagen would likely be worse. Even proponents of Kyoto described its 5% target as a modest first step toward reducing emissions. One analysis showed that Kyoto would reduce the Earth's temperature by no more than 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050. If participants at Copenhagen were serious, they would have to be much more economically reckless to meet their own environmental standards.

Waxman-Markey: The U.S. domestic global warming bill, which narrowly passed the House last June, contains far more stringent targets than Kyoto, requiring a 17% reduction in emissions from 2005 baseline levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050. The Heritage Foundation's analysis showed that this bill would easily qualify as "serious harm" to the U.S. economy, including reductions in GDP of $393 billion annually, total costs to a household of four of nearly $3,000 annually, and over 1 million net job losses.

Copenhagen Would Cost Too Much: In order to actually reduce emissions, similarly onerous targets to those in Waxman-Markey would be necessary in any global warming treaty coming out of Copenhagen, and those would certainly violate Byrd-Hagel and yield America a desperately tragic economic future.

The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a "Copenhagen Accord".

The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had "salvaged" a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc.

The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center.

This is what the Forthright Four asked for:

Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.

Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.

Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.

Point 4. No use of "global warming" as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

After President Obama's dramatic intervention to save the deal, this is what the Forthright Four got:

Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.

Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.

Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.

Point 4. No use of "global warming" as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

Here, in a nutshell - for fortunately nothing larger is needed - are the main points of the "Copenhagen Accord":

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write.

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as "the world's top climate scientist"), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC's policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in 'carbon trading' and 'sustainable technologies', which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international 'climate industry'.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri's links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world's leading 'climate official' can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC's recommendations.

The issue of Dr Pachauri's potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent 'climate sceptics'. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government's 'cap and trade scheme'. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC's science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.

Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC's 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri's personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.

The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week's Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.